Flak Magazine: Review of A Prairie Home Companion, 06-12-06

So spake J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the "Trinity" explosion, the first test of a nuclear weapon. Granted, he actually said "Shiva," but you would forgive Oppenheimer the flub had you both seen the ambiguously profound and disturbingly dark new Robert Altman joint, A Prairie Home Companion. The film, based on the Garrison Keillor-hosted NPR variety show of the same name, is more than meets the eye.

You may have read a number of reviews of the movie version of A Prairie Home Companion that mention the film's comfortingly cornball humor, or the singing cowboys, or wacky backstage pandemonium! that resembles nothing so much as the Muppet Show, sans the soothing antacid of Statler and Waldorf.

But you have probably read fewer items that discuss how Keillor stares somewhat unnervingly at a teenage girl who was, in effect, conceived as a result of his inattentive driving, or that the film features an eerily acted angel of death who, in her life on Earth, was killed in a car accident brought on by a particularly funny Garrison Keillor joke on A Prairie Home Companion.

Garrison giveth, and Garrison taketh away.

Keillor, or Y-HW-H, or whatever you want to call him, is magnetic when he's on the screen — he has a strangely detached yet magesterial presence that is only enhanced by his trademarked "Jowls on the Prowl" arched-eyebrows-perched-on-deadpan-face acting approach. And it's absolutely impossible to fault the gorgeous, soothingly engaging cadences of his voice — it's a treat to hear the guy in any setting, and the film is no exception to the rule.

But Keillor appears amidst a strange setting. Not the PHC show itself, which feels both fresh and comfortable, and is inoffensive and pleasurable as a Norman Rockwell painting; it's the "backstory" of the show, which seems to be working on at least three levels.

Level One: Garrison Keillor is the lovable host of a crazy variety show; meanwhile, wacky characters such as a detective he made up and a somewhat friendly angel of death run around backstage, causing antics.

Level Two: Garrison Keillor is actually the Supreme Being who brings life and death and rain and drought with the touch of his delicate, sensuous, serpentine fingers.

Level Three: Garrison Keillor is actually a regular joe who isn't actually God at all, except within the confines of the show, which is nothing more than a massive projection of his own ego and imagination. Tada! It's a writer playing out his own creative neurosis on a grand stage — in other words, St. Paul's own Woody Allen!

Levels beyond that? Sure. Is it actually humble to so clearly portray and actually chuckle at your own megalomania? Maybe so — but isn't that just a further acknowledgement of your own brilliance, and therefore just a manifestation of the world's most deep-rooted and pernicious case of vanity?

Ad infinitum! The man's a monster!

Thus: It is absolutely possible but by no means assured that Prairie Home Companion contains a subversive brilliance along the lines of other hidden gems within humble packages, such as Starship Troopers, Demolition Man or Con Air.

Keillor, unfortunately, fails to fully take up his own gauntlet and truly embrace the Hindu demigod he seems to have become by the end of the film, when an imaginary character of his own creation does murder on an inconvenient minor character by having a psychopathic (but creepily sexy!) angel/PHC listener drive him to his death.

It's not entirely clear what raising the stakes to a full-on balls-out commercially unviable level would entail, but I'd like to think it would involve Keillor using a straight razor to slice off the ear of some hapless audience member, and then speaking softly into it with his soothing radio voice, telling the unfortunate listener that the brutal mutilation had been sponsored by "Powder Milk Biscuits, readymade in the big blue box with the picture of the biscuit on the front."

That would do it.

So then the question emerges as to why, in a brain-bendingly clever box-within-a-box puzzle meditating on the very nature of creative power (both divine and human), Keillor and Altman include a scene with ... farting cowboys! Later in the movie, said cowboys (played gamely in both the fart- and non-fart-containing scenes by Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) perform a song comprised of mildly risque jokes that is the most shockingly funny cinematic musical number since South Park's "Uncle Fucker." Why vacillate between hilarity and flatulence? Maybe it's because the cowboy song is so funny that it feels a little bit like a very un-Minnesotan middle finger to the audience: "Hey, we could have made the entire film as funny as this song, but we thought it would be un-Minnesotan to be so immodest."

Check that. Maybe the film's briefly flashy brilliance amidst humble affability was one of the most authentically Minnesotan aspects of the whole deal. Layers upon layers, man. Layers upon layers.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)